When Valve brought Steamworks to the Playstation 3 for Portal 2, a light bulb flickered to life over my head. “What if Steam were to become the backbone of choice for the console’s online offerings?” I mused to myself.
Ever since then, the idea has been growing on me. I think it would be fantastic for publishers and developers to unify their game experiences across platforms. Valve achieved this with Portal 2, with portable cloud-based saving and even allowing for PC users to play against their console brethren. Imagine taking this further and having a single sign-on for friends lists, matchmaking, achievements, and microtransactions, regardless of whether you own an Xbox 360, a Wii, a PS3, or a desktop computational difference engine.
One Online Service To Rule Them All...
Of course, the platform owners (i.e. Microsoft, Sony, etc) are not interested in letting their users roam freely – and they have a couple of good reasons. First and foremost is profit: Xbox Live makes way too much money for Microsoft to consider outsourcing their online service or letting third parties in on their private cash trough. But beyond this, there is actually a customer service angle. Console users do not want to manage a Konami account, a Sega account, an EA account, a Ubisoft account (what? uplay? oh…), and Microsoft has provided a simple and unified process for doing all the online stuff they think you want to do. Sony has done this as well, to a much lesser extent (people like free, but did ANYONE ever ask for a second-rate Second Life like Home?)
So the current system works for the platform owners, and it kind of works for users who don’t cling to their own ideas about how they would like to play their games online. Even though most IPs cross the boundaries of multiple platforms, the experiences are completely siloed, forcing a brand-loyalty that pays dividends to the console makers instead of the game makers. It creates an artificial community based on hardware instead of the more organic communities that spring up around individual games or series. I don’t naturally think “these guys are my Xbox friends and those guys are my PS3 friends.” Instead, I tend to want to organize my friends list into “People who want to get together to smite evil,” and “people who want to rock the f*** out on plastic instruments!”
I think something like this existed for a while on the fractured PC gaming side of things with GameSpy. Didn’t they serve as the official provider of matchmaking, friends lists and server repositories for a lot of titles in the 90s and 00s? I imagine it worked well for the PC publishers since it was likely cheaper than rolling their own systems for every release.
Could Valve do the same for the current generation of console systems? If they could make it cheaper (or in this case EVEN MORE PROFITABLE) for Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, then they could sweep in and provide a 3rd party solution for all their online needs. I think Sony would benefit because we all know their reputation for running a secure and robust online system is in the toilet, and they would benefit greatly in consumer confidence if they partnered with another brand that has a neutral or positive legacy. It also makes sense for Nintendo because they are way late to the party, and will have to spend tons on research and development (not to mention infrastructure) just to reinvent the wheel for the Wii U’s network component. Microsoft, on the other hand, probably has no compelling reason to go this route because they seem to be making lots of money, and have little incentive to sell their cash cow.
Still, it is an idea worth pondering. As Steam broadens its scope and makes strides into the console market, I can’t help but wonder what role they will play in the future of online gaming. Could there even be a Steam console in the future?
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